Biography | Arthur Ashe — The Los Angeles Tennis Club Was Where He Trained and Where He Kept Coming Back, 1966

Ashe left Richmond for St Louis in 1960 because he could not play indoor tournaments in Virginia; he left St Louis for Los Angeles in 1961 because UCLA offered him a tennis scholarship on the recommendation of Richard Hudlin, the St Louis tennis official he had lived with while finishing high school.

At UCLA his coach was J. D. Morgan. His hitting partner and mentor, in the days when the two facts could be one, was Pancho Gonzales, who was banned from the amateur majors and had made a home at the Los Angeles Tennis Club.

The Los Angeles Tennis Club sat at 5851 Clinton Street, a block south of Melrose Avenue. It had been founded in 1920 and had run under Perry T. Jones the "Factory System" — patrons paying for coaching, coaches funnelling promising juniors to the club, the club then feeding them to the Pacific Southwest Championships every autumn.

From the 1930s to the early 1970s it was where American tennis measured itself. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Tennis_Club)

Ashe won the NCAA singles and doubles titles at UCLA in May 1965 and graduated in business administration in 1966. (https://uclabruins.com/honors/hall-of-fame/arthur-ashe/256)

The club at Clinton Street was where he played the tune-up tournaments through those years, and where he returned each spring after graduation as a US Army lieutenant on tennis leave.

The cover image is Ashe at the Los Angeles Tennis Club in the 1966 Southern California Sectional, four weeks after finishing at UCLA.

He is playing the two-handed follow-through of a right-handed backhand into a dark court-side canvas, a linesman visible on a folding chair at the back of the frame.

The caption on the news wire that ran the picture that week is preserved in the UCLA library catalogue: "POISED — Arthur Ashe, the No.2 ranking player in the U.S., is the favorite in the Southern California Sectional tennis championships now under way at the Los Angeles Tennis Club." (https://digital.library.ucla.edu/catalog/ark:/21198/zz0002q5rc)

Ashe was twenty-two, a UCLA graduate of eight weeks and about to enter the US Army as a commissioned officer, the second-ranked player in the country and a Davis Cup regular since 1963.

Two years and three months later he would win the first US Open at Forest Hills and be unable to accept the prize money.

Coordinate: 34.081900, -118.330300, precision radius 150 m. Two independent sources agree: the US Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder returns 34.081711, -118.330266 for 5851 Clinton Street, and Wikipedia's coordinate for the Los Angeles Tennis Club (P625) sits at 34.082099, -118.330329. The two are 43 m apart, and the midpoint used here places the pin on the club's court block between Clinton Street and Rosewood Avenue.

The clubhouse frontage on Clinton is inside this radius.

Cover: "Arthur Ashe in the 1966 Southern California Sectional", Los Angeles Times photograph (identified in the UCLA catalogue as more likely Times than Daily News), UCLA Library Digital Collections ark:/21198/zz0002q5rc, released CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.